Early African Religion

Early African religion – the Stone Age

The earliest evidence we have for religious faith in Africa is from Blombos Cave in South Africa, where people may have been using red ochre for funerals about 100,000 years ago. Around 6000 BC, people put up standing stones in East Africa (modern Sudan), maybe marking the changing seasons.

Early African religion: The Egyptian god Bes

African religion in the Bronze Age

In Egypt, by 3000 BC people were already worshipping Isis, Osiris, Ra, and the Amen. Further south in Sudan, the Kushites seem to have also worshipped these gods, along with their own gods, Apedemak and Sebiumeker. Some Nubian gods, like Bes, seem to have travelled north from Sudan to Egypt too.

In West Africa, however, the Bantu people seem to have been more monotheistic. They thought of there being one god, sometimes a sky god or sun god and sometimes not. By around 1300 BC, we can see the first strains of an interest in monotheism emerging in Egypt with Akhenaten.

Early African religion: the Phoenician goddess Tanit

Phoenician, Greek, and Roman gods come to Africa

Polytheism triumphed when Akhenaten died, though, and survived through the conquest of North Africa by the Phoenicians who introduced their own gods to North Africa, like the goddess Tanit and the god Ba’al. The Greeks, and then the Romans, soon added their gods to the gods worshipped in North Africa.

Christianity and African religion

Around 300 AD there was a second great change in African religious belief when many North and East Africans gradually followed the Roman Emperor’s lead in converting to the monotheistic faith of Christianity. The great Christian theologianSt. Augustine was from North Africa. By the 500s AD Christianity won over most of North Africa, including Egypt, and also the kingdom of Axum south of Egypt (modern Sudan, Eretria, and Ethiopia). The Christians of North Africa were split among the Donatists, the Catholics, and then the VandalArians.

Mosque in a medieval seaport in East Africa (Masjid al-Qiblatayn, Somalia, 600s AD)

Bantu ghosts and ancestors

In this same time period, the Bantu were gradually expanding across southern Africa, bringing their faith with them. Bantu faith continued to de-emphasize polytheism, while having instead a firm belief in ghosts and their power over living people. Some of these ghosts were your own dead parents or grandparents. Others might be the ghost of a dead king or hero, and these might be remembered for a long time, rather like Christian saints.

The rock-cut church of Lalibella

Islam and African religion

In the late 600s AD, another monotheistic faith, Islam, came to Africa, first across the Red Sea to Somalia, then to Egypt. After that, Islam spread rapidly across North Africa. A hundred years later, almost the entire population of North Africa had converted to Islam. Islam quickly spread across the Sahara Desert as well, so that many people who lived in the grasslands south of the Sahara became Muslims too.

Remains of the Great Mosque at Gedi, Kenya

All the way south to the great rain forests, there were many Muslims or people who followed at least some Muslim beliefs. And, thanks to Arab and Indian traders, the entire east coast of Africa became Muslim, as far south as Mozambique. Sudan also became mostly Muslim. But Ethiopia stayed Christian.

San Rock Art – people doing a sacred dance

South of the rain forests, in central and western Africa, Bantu religion remained dominant. And in the Kalahari desert, the San people kept up their own faith. It was very similar to the Bantu faith in its emphasis on ancestor ghosts.

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Karen Carr is Associate Professor Emerita, Department of History, Portland State University. She holds a doctorate in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan. Follow her on Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter, or buy her book, Vandals to Visigoths.

43 Comments

Interested in knowing the God that Africans worship during the time of Religious wars in England, and how Africans or black people came to be Christians? In the total scheme of time and space, are we all really serving the same GOD?

A Curious Christian

Karen Carr
March 16, 2018 at 1:54 pm

Most people in Africa were Muslims at the time of the wars of religion in England, that is, in the 1500s and 1600s AD. Others followed traditional religions. People were only Christians in Ethiopia and as a minority Coptic faith in Egypt, and in places colonized by the Portuguese: Congo, Angola, and Mozambique, where many people had converted to Catholicism. In the late 1800s and 1900s, thousands of Protestant missionaries went from Europe and the United States to Africa and converted many more people to Christianity. Today, Africa is mostly split between Islam and Christianity.

Someone From The Far Corner Of The Internet
March 9, 2018 at 8:37 am - Reply

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